The Modern Muse

New poetry collections embrace an old tradition

by Myung Joh Wesner

"O Muses, O high genius, aid me now!" writes Dante Alighieri in The Inferno, the first section of his epic poem, The Divine Comedy. Invoking the muses at the start of a poem dates back to Homer and the Roman poet Virgil. Dante called on the Classical muses—the nine goddesses of artistic inspiration. But he also found new muses in Virgil as well as Beatrice Portinari, a childhood acquaintance. Both appear in literary form in The Divine Comedy to lead Dante through hell, purgatory and heaven.

Dante was one of the first poets to invoke real people rather than mythical figures as muses. Though Dante barely knew Beatrice in the actual world, she became "the glorious lady of [his] mind." From Dante and Beatrice to Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick, artists and muses have maintained a mysteriously symbiotic relationship for nearly as long as art itself has been around. The artist draws inspiration from the muse, while the muse achieves fame, or even a kind of immortality, through the artist's works.

Kiki Petrosino
Mickie Winters

Two alumni are following in Dante's footsteps by taking as their muses people who exist (or once did) in the real world. Poet Kiki Petrosino (Col '01) uses Robert Redford as an inspiration in her book of poems, Fort Red Border (which is an anagram of "Robert Redford"). Petrosino is quick to clarify that the Redford in her poems is a muse and not the living Hollywood celebrity. "It was not really a conscious decision on my part. It was more like Redford wandered into some of my poems and seemed to want to stay," she explains. She realized she could explore certain elements of the speaker's emotions by putting the Redford muse in her poems. "My Redford represents a cure for loneliness," she says.

Petrosino's appreciation of Dante and the relationship he shares with Virgil figured largely into this creative endeavor. She first studied The Inferno as an undergraduate at UVA. "It was in this course that I first read the beautiful language that Dante uses to describe the bond that exists between the two figures," she says. Just as Dante knows Virgil only through his own poetic creation, so does the speaker of Fort Red Border know the actor Robert Redford: "The 'Redford' persona that I invent for the series is completely imaginary, and that project of imagination is essential to understanding the series," Petrosino says.

Fort Red Border by Kiki Petrosino

In these sometimes tender, sometimes funny poems, the beloved washes the speaker's hair, splits a serving of pommes frites with her and shares a series of domestic moments so comfortingly commonplace that the iconic name "Redford" creates a jarring juxtaposition. But Redford's fame is not the subject here. "The speaker is the real star of the poems," Petrosino says. "As I worked through the series, the Hollywood familiarity of 'Redford' became a kind of formal constraint—something to work against. I enjoy imposing constraints on my writing, just to see how far I can go. In this case, I wanted to 'invent' my own muse."

Now an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Louisville, Petrosino credits her years at UVA with setting her on the path to a career in poetry. As a Jerome Holland Scholar and an Echols Scholar, she took classes with professors Gregory Orr and Jerome McGann. She can still remember receiving her acceptance letter into the Echols program, on which the late professor Charles Vandersee had handwritten a personal message: Your poems do you great credit. "To receive those few words of validation—to say nothing of the opportunities Echols presented—meant a lot to a 17-year-old Star Trek geek," she recalls. "Put simply, attending UVA helped me claim the writer's life as my own."

Poet Paul Legault (Grad '09) has come to know the writer's life quite well since graduating from UVA's MFA program. His first collection, The Madeleine Poems, was the winner of the 2009 Omnidawn Poetry Prize; his second, The Other Poems, was published in 2011. His third collection, The Emily Dickinson Reader, an "English-to-English" translation of Emily Dickinson's entire oeuvre, was published by McSweeney's in August.

Paul Legault
Billy Merrell

Although Emily Dickinson is his most famous muse, she isn't his first. Legault's The Madeline Poems revolves around an imaginary woman named Madeline. "At that point in my life, the muse was a feminine figure of inspiration for me."

It wasn't long before a new muse replaced Madeline. "Dickinson became my muse when I was in a Dickinson and Whitman class at UVA, taught by Stephen Cushman," Legault says. "That class was really helpful, in terms of pushing me toward her." As the class was reading all of her poems in chronological order, Legault started to scribble marginalia about each poem according to what his classmates said—"the basic versions that they came up with"—and an exercise that began as an amusement turned into something bigger. The final result is a poem-by-poem translation of Dickinson's poetry to literal meanings.

"I describe it as a joke that became serious," Legault laughs. As he fell deeper into his project, he found himself completely immersed in Dickinson's work, carrying the poems around with him constantly in order to find time to examine and translate every single one.

"She was with me every day at lunch, and I would write in the margins—I would actually read the poems and respond to what they were saying." Ultimately, Dickinson became quite real to him: "Muses are generous and giving and inspiring, as muses should be, but they're also ghosts who are haunting you," he cautions, "and they won't leave you alone until you're done with the project that they set before you."

The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault

Even though his Dickinson volume is now complete, Legault's fascination with nontraditional poetry translations continues, primarily through Telephone Journal, a literary journal that Legault founded with his friend Sharmila Cohen. Each issue features four or five poems by a single foreign writer, which are then creatively "translated" by multiple other poets.

"Every issue produces something original," he says, explaining the name of the journal, "which is what the game of Telephone illustrates." Recently the journal expanded to include a new publishing imprint, Telephone Books, which will publish its inaugural book this fall: an anthology of 154 poets, including literary stars such as Rae Armantrout and Ron Padgett, who have translated Shakespeare's 154 sonnets into new, original poems.

Legault is now on the lookout for his "next obsession." Then again, perhaps Dickinson does have a few more things in store for him. "I started working on this Emily Dickinson biopic screenplay the other day," he admits. "I don't know if I'll pursue it, but I feel like she could come back. She's such a huge figure."

Poetry In Motion

Poetry at the University is "thriving," says Lisa Russ Spaar (Col '78, Grad '82), professor of creative writing and director of the undergraduate Area Program in Poetry Writing (APPW), which she founded 11 years ago. Creative writing classes at UVA "serve a great many undergraduates from different schools and departments," she says. Both undergraduate and graduate poetry students take workshops and seminars with Spaar, Rita Dove, Greg Orr, Debra Nystrom (Grad '82) and the recently hired poet Paul Guest. "Paul brings fresh energy to the program," Spaar says. "The students really love him."

Undergraduates in the APPW also have the chance to be mentored by graduate students in the MFA program, forming bonds that last far beyond graduation. Many poets who emerge from the MFA program have gone on to find publishing success. In the past year, eight alumni from the program published collections of poetry, including Katherine Larson (Grad '04), whose book, Radial Symmetry, was the 2010 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition winner. "That was a serious kudo," says Jeb Livingood (Col '86, Grad '00), associate director of the creative writing program. Other recent books include:

Redford & I are alone in the darkened galley
of the Martin 130 flying boat that rests on the exhibition floor
of the City Museum of Industry. We don’t have much
room to move—just this narrow strip of tile between two
moulded counters & a miniature drinks trolley
with its wheels glued down. The cabinets above our heads shelter
a permanent supply of gilt-rimmed fiberglass plates
& Kirk Stieff silver welded into bristling
thickets of service. I’m standing so close to Redford
that the chemical taste of his aftershave mingles with the flakes
of dust that peel down from the highball glasses.
Redford presses my hand tightly into his chest. Darling—
I could marry you in this goddamned airliner, built or unbuilt.
His mouth tastes warmly of night mail & belted
trenchcoats. On that breakfast approach to Midway
at 160 mph, the Chief Engineer watched gooney birds thicken
& glow above the island & grinned over the hydromatic
rim of his coffee. As for me, I’ve crossed
the International Dateline & felt
so much older afterwards, as if my body had adjourned
into hollow stalks of cane. Many times it was
like that for me, alone. I could move
in two directions at once—it was a broken
kind of trying I could not tell the bottom of.
It stirred with me in rooms, a frightened thing
of glass & shifting wire. I didn’t tell about it.
Only held with it & fevered nightwise over slanting
countries of my thought—& then I knew there was no
taking back that trying from me, & I was made for being this
& this is how. This is how—in the half-dark, Redford, even closer.
I kiss his jaw & say This is the maiden flight of harm, the green
air above Manila. I slowly draw his collar open.
I feel his ribcage lift against me: Tell me what
thou art, wild. & then: What art thou, wild?
The floor begins to sound & tilt; we quicken
in the blackest way of engines.
I tell Redford I want such days as days forgive.
I flick my tongue across his bottom lip.
How can I keep from singing?

This Will Darken the Cabin
Excerpted from Ford Red Border by Kiki Petrosino (Sarabande Books, 2009).

Halfway through my plate of tiger prawns
Redford returns from the cockpit tour.
Such a face he says. Were you this soulful as a child?
He tips my chin & slides my headset back.
I’ve been listening to the pilots marking weather
in their code talk. Right now we’re at two-five-five
knots, heading straight into the soup above
Las Vegas. Our pilot has a clean, grey voice—
like creosote or silverware. He’s just said advise.
He’s just said preparing. Redford eases
into his seat, folding one knee
over the other. He rolls his double brandy
in a plastic snifter. The cuffs of his soft green shirt
are pushed into his elbows. I had some soulful ways, I guess.
I tuck into a small ramekin of green gage plums
soaked in cream & rice vinegar. At the edge
of my vision, Redford lifts his spoon, considering
the loose pyramid of Asian jungle fowl
on his tray. I pick up a tiny package
of salt. Know what I used to do with this?
I reach across Redford’s lap, taking a lengthy swallow
of brandy from his glass. At night, I’d eat this.
It was a thing. I’d pour a whole bunch
in my mouth, & then I’d chew until my tongue opened.
For the first time, I notice how it’s very quiet
here in First Class. I drain the brandy, listening to the hum hum
of the cabin lights against my gulps. Below us, Las Vegas
is an orange watchglass someone shattered. I think
about the neon people down there, the funny cowboy with tubes
of brown light for a ten-gallon hat, & I think how hard it must be
to make brown neon, & how we still need science.
After a moment, I feel Redford take the snifter
from my hand. He lowers it into the circular depression
in his tray. The plastic hazes where my palm
has touched. Redford reaches over, snapping
my tray into the seatback. Then he finds the place
where my safety belt catches. He gently pulls until
the belt tightens, low & quiet on my hips. He keeps his palm
on the buckle & I settle back. What made me, made me.
Above our heads, the reading lights go out.

600. I love Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She is a really good poet. I want to have sex with her. I want to marry Elizabeth Barrett Browning and take her virginity in our honeymoon suite somewhere in Italy.

601. The meaning of life cannot exist before the life whose meaning is in question doesn't.

602. Certain deaths are fashionable. I heard death by childbirth is really in this season.

603. The sun wants to destroy the sky, but it can't.

604. You know who I'm talking about. She's the one who always wears velvet and that orange vest and instead of feet she has hands. She's kind of intense.

605. I am alive but only because I'm not dead. On another note, sometimes I want you to give birth to me.

606. It's always summer when you're a nymph.

607. I hate having to wait for a cab.

608. I don't know which I like more: happiness or sadness. I guess probably happiness. No, now I’m just lying to myself.

609. It is hard to distinguish night from day at the moment of their intersection.

610. Butterflies are really full of themselves. They like to fly around, looking good, pitying everyone.

611. I fell in love with my imaginary friend. And then she died. Or else I stopped imagining her. Or else she stopped imagining me?

629. I am a civil war. Sue is the new union I want to establish as an independent nation.

630. Souls enjoy space travel.

631. I am going to drown myself to prove how much I love you. You're welcome.

632. It's better to be homeless than to lack a system of belief.

633. This one time I touched the Universe, and it exploded, and then no one existed except me. I’m sorry about that.

634. I guess I'm pessimistic.

635. I wish I were rich so I could waste my money on a slut like you.

636. At every moment, I am being struck by lightning.

637. Someone please wake up that dead person so I can thank her for being so nice to me.

638. The future does what it wants.

639. Happiness requires hard work and a desperate sense of ownership.

640. The death of an artist makes his or her work increase in value because of the public's fascination with its own mortality. Its willingness to view the art in question outside of previous negative political connotations that might have arisen from the artist's counter-normative lifestyle stems partially from the particular work and partially from the particular artist but mostly from the subjects of mourning and their need to cope with a refreshed awareness of their own death and death's consequences. By collectively celebrating the deceased and his or her creative act, they are protecting the general idea of legacy, thereby protecting their own.

641. Shh, don't let people know that it is possible for me not to exist.